Edwin Morgan & Sonnets
In 2010 I first made contact with the poet and Professor James McGonigal, who was both a colleague, and a close friend of the ‘Makar’ (National Poet of Scotland) Edwin Morgan. By this stage in his 89th year, Edwin Morgan was now in a care home in Glasgow, and acting as an intermediary, Jim was happy to relay messages between myself and EM regarding projects I was working on which took inspiration from the poet’s work.
Jim told EM about my Sonnets photographic project which owed its name to one of my favourite collections of his poetry ‘Sonnets from Scotland’ published in 1984, the year of my birth. Although frail, Eddie was still creative, and was putting the last touches on his final collection of poems ‘Dreams and other Nightmares’. Eddie was also still keen to meet and encourage young artists and poets. A meeting was arranged, and soon I was sitting in Eddie’s room discussing with him the images I had been making over the past few years.
During that first visit I also made a portrait of the poet which took inspiration from an image of Thomas Carlyle by Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. It would later be used on the cover of his biography ‘Beyond the Last Dragon’ written by Jim, which includes this short and fitting description of my tribute to EM:
“Sonnets is a haunting series of Scottish landscapes with a single figure, not seeking to illustrate Edwin Morgan’s work in any sense but to respond to it in a different medium. Similar structural elements in each picture play the role of octave/sestet or rhyme in the sonnet form of which the poet was so fond.”
I was greatly saddened when he passed away in August of 2010, but I am glad that I had the chance to work with such an inspirational figure, and arguably one of Scotland’s greatest sons, the last of the canonical big seven.